Weird initiative with Maidan in background

This is how the leader of the European Belarus civic campaign, candidate for president of Belarus in 2010 Andrei Sannikov commented for the charter97.org on the visit to Minsk of the head of the Eastern Partnership Department of the European External Action Service, who claimed that Brussels intends to launch a so-called interim phase of cooperation with Belarusian authorities:

- The visit of the head of the Eastern Partnership Department Dirk Shubel was unexpected and, to put it mildly, weird, especially with the events in Ukraine in the background. It seems like he brought to Minsk propositions of cooperation with the dictatorial regime.

The fact that civil society is mentioned in these suggestions is simply a tribute to the ritual, but not some essential steps. It is caught in the attention that the department’s head immediately singled out the main areas of the interim phase initiative – investments and trade. On the part of the European Union such an initiative is simply the modernization of the engagement policy. With enviable stubbornness the EU repeats the same mistakes that were already made in Belarus.

Such mistakes contributed to the development of the tragic events in Ukraine, since they also counted there on authoritarian leadership and modernization by the means of agreements with an unpredictable partner.

We can also recollect the EU’s mistakes as to Gaddafi and al-Assad. We know what it led to. You get an impression that when the European Union’s politicians, although slowly, but do try to analyze the events in Ukraine, the events in the Eastern Partnership region and take some adequate measures, European bureaucracy gets active in the opposite direction, which has already repeatedly led to tragic consequences, including in Belarus.

“The modernization of modernization, which is concealed under the name of the “interim phase”, will lead to the reinvigoration and equipment of the dictatorship punitive apparatus. One may recollect that we already had that. These were German experts, who taught special forces and Belarus’ police how to fight terrorism, which in our situation means fighting opposition. We can see that the Berkut in Kiev is very well equipped with precisely Western kits, the bullets used are majorly made in the West.

We saw and felt the same when the Square was dispersed, when riot police and special police squads were equipped with obviously foreign kits.

European bureaucrats are trying again to come up with come strategies, far from reality and even unfeasible, in order to help not Belarus, but the dictatorship. They bring them already made, having discussed them with the representatives of the dictator, without consulting with opposition or former political prisoners and their family members, who today have a greater right to speak up and declare their opinion and the vision of the situation and explain what unreasoned steps on the part of the EU lead to”, -Andrei Sannikov claimed.